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A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.

What Happened When a Chinese TV Station Replaced Its Meteorologist with a Chatbot A Microsoft artificial intelligence program is now explaining the weather to Dragon TV viewers, part of a one-year “internship” the program is doing at the station. The program, called Xiaoice, is designed to be a friendly version of Siri, one that remembers a user’s mood and participates in long conversations rather than offering quick answers. —Nanette Byrnes, senior editor, Business Reports

The Happiness Code Silicon Valley’s “new approach to self-improvement,” driven in part by one of the people warning of AI armageddon. —Brian Bergstein, executive editor

A Lethal AI Robot Will Police the Great Barrier Reef for Starfish A particular type of starfish is responsible for 42 percent of the decline in the Great Barrier Reef’s coral, and it’s wreaking havoc at a rate that human divers just can’t keep up with. So an autonomous underwater robot will soon be deployed to lend them a hand … or an extendable arm, as it were. —Julia Sklar, social media editor

OkCupid Adds a Feature for the Polyamorous One of the titan apps of the online dating world is branching out as far as what types of relationships its algorithms will support. But it got me thinking more generally: there are so many dating apps available to us, yet despite changes in the social era, so many of them are still heteronormative—a design choice for which algorithmic constraints are often scapegoated. I call BS. It’s 2016 and algorithms are learning to drive cars. —Julia Sklar

The Outcome of My Clinical Trial Is a Mystery I’m biased because one of my friends from graduate school wrote this piece for the Atlantic, but I think she has a very compelling personal story that highlights the alarming holes in the clinical trial process. Especially as it relates to the experience of the human guinea pigs themselves. —Julia Sklar

Modeling Analysis of EPA’s Clean Power Plan Opponents of the Clean Power Plan have charged that it will cause energy prices to soar. That’s not so, according to this report from the energy consultancy M.J. Bradley, which found that, under the plan, “U.S. households would save between 5% and 20% on their monthly electricity bills in 2030.” —Richard Martin, senior editor, energy

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